Urban gardens are a major source of nectar in towns and cities

Flower gardens, the team found, provide a whopping 85 percent of the nectar in urban areas.

By Alison Pearce Stevens
Science News For Students
April 2, 2021

Excerpt:

Many pollinator studies focus on insects. Nicholas Tew was more interested in the flowers they visit. Tew is an ecologist at the University of Bristol in England. He was curious how much nectar was available in different types of habitats. He also wanted to know how cities compared to other landscapes. City flowers haven’t been studied as closely as those found on farms and in nature reserves. But Tew thought they might be just as important in feeding pollinators.

“Urban areas cover a relatively small fraction of all land,” he says. But “they can be particularly important because most of [the British] countryside is taken over by intensive farming.”

Tew and a team of researchers looked at previously collected data. Those came from 12 sites across the United Kingdom. The team focused on three landscape types: urban areas, farms and nature reserves. They tallied a total of 536 types of flowering plants. Some were found only on farms or in nature reserves. Others appeared only in urban areas. Still others occurred in two or all three landscapes.

Cities had a much higher diversity of flowering plants than surrounding areas, they found. Cities hosted many non-native species, too, such as begonias and butterfly bush. People often plant these species for their beauty. Farm sites and nature reserves had less plant diversity. But they had more native species, such as bellflower and heather.

Plant diversity is important because different pollinators prefer different types of flowers, Tew says. They may prefer yellow blooms over purple ones, for example. Or broad flowers over those that are cup-shaped. “Flowers have different shapes, sizes, colors and scents, and pollinators vary in their preferences,” Tew notes. The more variety of flowering plants in one area, the more likely that pollinators can find their favorite food.

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